1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to the field of reforming fuel for use in fuel cells and other energy-producing systems such as internal combustion engines, auxiliary power units, furnaces, heaters, boilers and fuel upgrading reactors.
2. Description of the Related Art
Fuel Cells are efficient, environmentally friendly and have the potential to be used in many power generation markets. For this potential to be realized, fuel cells need to be fuel flexible, and operate on liquid fuels derived from either petroleum, coal or biomass feedstocks. For example, in the distributed generation market, for remote operation, or as a back up fuel, petroleum distillate (e.g. #1 or #2), as well as liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), can be used. In the truck Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) market, the fuel cell needs to work on diesel fuel and in military transport and mobile power applications, the fuel of choice is logistic fuel (e.g. diesel, JP-5 and JP-8). For these applications, distillate fuels need to be reformed and converted to a reformate suitable to fuel cells. For Solid Oxide fuel cells, the suitable reformate is CO and hydrogen and for PEM fuel cells it is pure hydrogen. Since the process for converting CO and hydrogen to pure hydrogen is well established, the main challenge in using distillate fuels in fuel cells is to convert them to CO and hydrogen (i.e. syngas). Reforming distillate fuels to syngas has three major challenges; 1) the fuel has heavy ends that can transform into carbon and gums that can block passages and deposit on surfaces, thereby deactivating reformer and fuel cell elements, 2) the fuel has enough sulfur to poison reforming catalysts and fuel cell reactive elements, resulting in short lifetimes and (3) containments in the fuel, from either them original refining operation or post refining handling, can create deposits that deactivate reformer and fuel cell elements. Because of these challenges, no reliable, effective and efficient reformer has been developed to operate on these fuels.